CRC-Based Message Authentication for 5G Mobile Technology

Our society greatly depends on mobile technologies. As wirelessly connected devices take over the control of the electricity in our homes, the water we drink and the transportation we use, it becomes increasingly important to guarantee the security of interactions of all players involved in a network. Apart from the high security needs, 5G will require utmost efficiency in the use of bandwidth and energy. In this paper, we show how to make the type of CRC checksum used in current LTE standards cryptographically secure with minimum extra resources. We present a new CRC-based message authentication method and provide a quantitative analysis of the achieved security as a function of message and CRC sizes. The presented method retains most of the implementation simplicity of the traditional CRC except that the LFSR implementing the encoding and decoding is required to have re-programmable connections. Similarly to previously proposed cryptographically secure CRCs, the presented CRC enables combining the detection of random and malicious errors without increasing bandwidth. Its main advantage is the ability to detect all double-bit errors in a message, which is of special importance for systems using Turbo codes, including LTE.